Do Very Thin Women Make More Money?

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When you look around your office at the various levels of female employees, do you notice anything? Anything at all? According to a new study, it's likely if you look, you'll see that the very thin women are in higher positions of authority—or less obviously, are making more money.

It's no secret that men make more money than women, and that pay gap is decreasing. But when you look at the woman-to-woman pay ratio, Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable say in the Journal of Applied Psychology, that very thin women, weighing 25 pounds less than the group norm, earn an average $15,572 a year more than women of normal weight. But that's not all.

While women earn less and less as their weight increases—a woman who gains 25 pounds above the average weight earns an average $13,847 less than an average-weight female—men make more and more as they get heavier until they are obese, after which the pay scale reverses.

"Thin guys earned $8,437 less than average-weight men. But they were consistently rewarded for getting heavier, a trend that tapered off only when their weight hit the obese level. In one study, the highest pay point, on average, was reached for guys who weighed a strapping 207 pounds," according to the Wall Street Journal Online.

I hate this. There's so much to say about this I don't know where to begin. The argument is that perhaps because society expects women to be very thin, employers hire very thin women because they indeed do their jobs better and are more persuasive.

But then that means women's jobs are intrinsically bound to their looks and in fact, it is our beauty that people react to and not our brains.

What do you think? Have you noticed this or experienced it in your workplace?